US Treasury Secretary John Snow has defended a secret programme which has been tracking international money transactions for nearly five years. "This programme is an effective weapon in the larger war on terror," he said. The scheme, which has sifted huge amounts of data from an international banking consortium, was revealed by the New York Times newspaper on Friday. The US treasury says the programme was strictly confined to the records of suspected foreign terrorists. Although there is no direct connection, the programme has echoes of a recently revealed US surveillance programme in which millions of international and domestic phone calls and e-mails were monitored, correspondents say. They say that although the US government insists it acted on a firm legal footing, this programme is likely to elicit similar charges of enfringement of civil liberties. ... http://news.bbc.co.uk

The increasing ease of becoming a millionaire became clear Tuesday, with the announcement that the ranks of world millionaires had swelled to 8.7 million last year, half a million more than the population of New York City. Millionaires also invested more aggressively, pouring cash into emerging markets and pulling it out of fixed income holdings, as their wealth reached $33.3 trillion, more than double U.S. economic output, a study by Merrill Lynch and consultancy Capgemini found. The red-hot Middle East saw nearly 10 percent growth in millionaires, the world's fastest rate, with record oil revenues and soaring stock markets pushing 300,000 people over the million-dollar mark. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/20/business/main1733648.shtml?source=RSS&attr=World_1733648

Nearly one in every four Americans has no close confidant, according to a study that found that the average person's circle of close friends has shrunk considerably in the last two decades.The study, published Friday in the American Sociological Review, found that Americans' social contacts are focusing less on neighbors and more "on the very strong bonds of the nuclear family.""The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a sociology professor at Duke University and one of the study's authors.Possible causes of the shrinking circle of close contacts include an increase in work hours and the influence of Internet communication, the authors said.The study is based on face-to-face interviews of 1,467 people conducted in 2004, compared with a similar number of interviews conducted in 1985....http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/23/ap/national/mainD8IE2VPO3.shtml

The National Park Service wants Congress to remove the word "internment" from the name of a national park commemorating a World War II prison camp for Japanese-Americans.In a management plan for the Minidoka Internment National Monument finalized this week, the Park Service says the term legally means imprisonment of civilian enemy aliens during wartime and does not accurately reflect the government's forced relocation of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.The agency wants the name changed to Minidoka National Historic Site, which would match with the only similar prison camp under its protection, California's Manzanar National Historic Site.Monument superintendent Neil King and the leader of a group of Minidoka internees and their descendants said former camp residents have been divided over the name....http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/23/ap/national/mainD8IE3O701.shtml

Iraq's government imposed a state of emergency on Baghdad and ordered everyone off the streets on Friday after U.S. and Iraqi forces battled insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles near the heavily fortified Green Zone.The military announced the deaths of five more U.S. troops in a deadly week for American forces that included the discovery of the brutalized bodies of two kidnapped soldiers.Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with heavily armed attackers throughout the morning Friday in the alleys and doorways along Haifa Street and within earshot of the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. and British embassies and Iraqi government headquarters.Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded before the area was sealed and searched house-to-house for insurgent attackers, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said. U.S. and Iraqi forces also engaged in firefights with insurgents in the dangerous Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad....http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/23/ap/world/mainD8IE3T4O2.shtml

The Indian government is experimenting with new ways of fighting back against Maoist fighters, who now operate in almost half of the country's 28 states. In the past year, the Chhattisgarh state government has introduced new anti-terrorism training for the police - and is backing a civil militia called Salwa Judum. The BBC's Jill McGivering spent three days travelling with Maoist fighters in the jungles of Chhattisgarh. Driving through Chhattisgarh at dawn, we saw a group of villagers by the road, shouldering sticks as if they were guns and marching up and down doing military drill. There were about 30 of them, many just young boys who looked about 12 or 13 years old. Some of the men were middle-aged and looked unfit, with pot bellies. As we stopped and walked across to talk to them, a group of young women, in brightly coloured saris, crossed too and formed their own marching unit alongside the men. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5072170.stm